Language Arts Pedagogy
Composition, Rhetoric, and the Progym
Composition
Teaching composition is intimidating. Everyone agrees about its importance, yet most of us feel unequal to the task. Cottage Press aims to equip you to mentor your students in the art of expressing true, beautiful, and virtuous thoughts in a winsome way. This is the essence of the classical liberal art of rhetoric.
Rhetoric, like all liberal arts, comprises both content and craft. It is a discipline with a particular body of knowledge to be mastered, but it is also the development of habits that enable that mastery — which, in turn, aid the student in the mastery of all other disciplines. Across two thousand years of Christendom, the classical principles of rhetoric, along with its sister trivium arts grammar and logic, were the primary means of teaching composition.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these tried and true methods of instruction began to be abandoned in favor of modern progressive education methods. Today we are faced with a widely lamented decline in writing skills among students of all educational backgrounds. Mere coincidence?
We think not.
It is true that some students who are naturally gifted in language still manage to learn to write well, particularly if they read well. Some educators therefore conclude that immersion in worthy books is all a student needs in order to learn to the art of composition. Certainly, reading well is crucial, but for most students, it is simply not enough. The majority of students need specific training in composition in order to communicate clearly and persuasively in writing. In fact, the trivium arts of language should be the very cornerstone of a student’s education.
Teachers and parents who never received much effective instruction in composition are daunted by this prospect. But never fear! The ancient teachers of rhetors left us with a set of principles — the canons of rhetoric — which provide guiding principles for teaching composition. There are five canons: Invention, Arrangement, Eloquence (Style), Memory, and Delivery. Cottage Press Language Arts focus most heavily on the first three, as the last two are more specifically directed towards public speaking.
The Canons of Rhetoric
The canons are are beautifully simple, and those first three de-mystify the process of teaching composition. They address the three things every writer must consider when pen is put to paper: invention, arrangement, and elocution.
Invention—What am I going to Say?
The word itself is derived from the Latin invenire, literally to come upon or to find. Most of us have had the agonizing experience of staring at a blank piece of paper (computer screen) with no idea what to write. Most young scholars simply do not have the life experience and wisdom to develop meaningful content, making “what am I going to say?” a doleful lament instead of a delightful quest. Not so with the classical method of analyzing and imitating worthwhile works. Invention is discovering the important ideas.
Arrangement—In what order?
Arrangement is organizing the content in a composition. The ancients developed fixed principles of arrangement and particular outlines suited to the purpose of the speech or composition. Mastering and then imitating these outlines helps students to write with structure and focus. Arrangement is establishing the optimal order.
Elocution—In what manner?
The personal style of an apprentice under a great master will come forth in time, but that style will be informed by the brilliance of the master. In the same way, the style, or voice, of our young scholars will come forth in due time, but it will reflect the great masters under whom they have apprenticed. Immersion in well-written and enduring works of the past fosters eloquence in our students.
Elocution is employing winsome words.
Composition lessons must cultivate a students’ ability to communicate important ideas in the optimal order with winsome words. Every lesson at every level in Cottage Press Language Arts provides students and teachers with principles and practice in these three essential components of invention, arrangement, and elocution.
The Progymnasmata
The Greek Progymnasmata (pro jim nas MAH tah) are successive exercises designed to train students in elegant and effective rhetoric. The aim of the training is to produce persons well able to discuss and defend truth, goodness, and beauty in the public forum. Training in rhetoric and training in virtue go hand-in-hand in both the content and the organization of the Progym.
The fourteen exercises together are the Progymnasmata (plural); each individual exercise is a progymnasma (singular). Ancient teachers of rhetoric held various opinions on the number and names of progymasmata and the order in which they should be taught. Most current curricula based on the Progym agree on fourteen, although the names of each and the order may vary somewhat.
The Progym and the Canons of Rhetoric
The Progym is an unparalleled writing pedagogy. It trains students Students in principles of clear thinking and winsome writing, while simultaneously aiming them toward the love of virtue. The Progym and the first three canons of rhetoric work in perfect harmony to prepare students to be thoughtful, eloquent, and virtuous lifetime learners.
Invention—what am I going to say? The content of each exercise in the Progym is prescribed, so the question is already answered by the required structure. In the earliest exercises, students retell enduring stories of the past. As students mature and gain skill, they examine proverbs and anecdotes according to their wisdom and wit. They examine stories for their verity and validity — or for the lack thereof. They consider particular acts, both evil and good, and their due reward. They examine and compare lives of notable people, both noble and base. They write speeches from the perspective of a particular person, famous or infamous, and they vividly describe a person or a place or a time period. Finally, they examine the virtue of general propositions and evaluate laws embodying those propositions. Throughout the exercises of the Progym, students write about ideas that matter, that incline his or her affections to those things that are true, good, and beautiful.
Arrangement—in what order? The structure of each exercise in the Progym is also prescribed, so again, the question is already answered. The earliest exercises require students to retell stories in a linear fashion, training them to discern, prioritize, and order the essential action. Then they are encouraged to experiment with different chronologies within a story to see how a different chronology might add interest and variety to their presentation of the main story. Later exercises have a fixed outline, with each paragraph or group of paragraphs examining a specific facet of the matter at hand. This promotes orderly thinking, logical arguments, and a cohesive whole, even as the exercises become longer and more complex.
Elocution (Style)—in what manner? Each exercise of the Progym begins with an age-appropriate selection from literature or history or poetry or Scripture. Examples of each Progym exercise written by ancient teachers of rhetoric provide worthy models to imitate. Time-honored literary passages and poetry imprint elegant patterns of language on the mind of the student. Students learn to identify and appreciate precise diction through careful attention to ab author’s word choice, sentence structure, and syntax. All of this tunes the ear to elegance, which then overflows into the habitual expression of lip and pen!
The skills students learn as they progress through the exercises of the Progym have broad application in the writing required for their academic careers. In many cases, a single exercise of the Progym may fulfill the requirements of particular academic writing assignment. The exercises may be combined, adapted, and crafted into an academic essay. Yet, the exercises of the Progym also provide excellent preparation for writing beyond academia. This has been the norm through the ages:
“In classical, medieval, and renaissance literature . . . progymnasmatic forms (fable, narrative, [anecdote], [description], comparison, speech in character) were often combined in different ways to create epics, dramas, histories, and the genres of lyric poetry. As such, they are comparable to structural features of classical architecture that were artistically utilized in the great public buildings of the Greco-Roman period and were revived in the Renaissance in the West. Not only the secular literature of the Greeks and Romans, but the writings of early Christians beginning with the gospels and continuing through the patristic age, and of some Jewish writers as well, were molded by the habits of thinking and writing learned in schools.”
— George A. Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric
Cottage Press Language Arts courses are organized around the Progym because it is a comprehensive pedagogy, aimed at developing rhetorical skill as well as love of virtue. Students trained by the Progym are prepared for ALL of life’s writing requirements including—but not limited to—academic and college-level composition.